So. Hooman. Are you ready for our meeting? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . So. Hooman. Are you ready for our meeting? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ ...
Last week I was organising a drawer full of wood and computer case screws, then sneezed, banged my knee hard against it reflexively, and sent a not insignificant number of the screws across the floor, which I then stepped on, jumped, slipped, fell on my arse, and banged my head against the table. It was, as my late grandad Jim would say, fun . It’s been a similarly fun few days for security. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica : The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’...
Samartha Chandrashekar & Nick Parker You click play on a Friday night, and in the second that follows, dozens of services answer in milliseconds. Most of them run on Titus, our internal container platform. Titus is, in essence, a Kubernetes-based container hosting platform: we keep both the control plane and the data plane (the container hosts that actually run containers) patched and up to date, so application teams get a consistent and reliable container experience. They hand us a container...
I Just Can’t Wait to Be King in 16:9, running as native code. TLKRecomp is The Lion King for the Super Nintendo, rebuilt as a native PC program. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, plays from the Westwood logo to the final fight with Scar, and can widen the picture to 16:9. It took ten days, and AI agents wrote the code. They worked in a loop: try something, compare it frame by frame with the original game, find the first thing that differs, fix it, and go again. This post explains ...
I stopped in awe. Looking up, I saw a tall tree whose base was yellow and top was red, with all of its leaves glistening in the golden sun that made its way through the clouds we have seen in recent days. An adjacent tree had a combination of green leaves and barren branches, prompting me to wonder why. These are two different types of trees. I know not their names, but all trees are beautiful. The path was full of colour. I took a deep breath of the cold air. Was I also trying to breathe ...
We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it. Anyone who used email in the 1990s remembers a similar, primitive era, when worms and viruses briefly ruled the net. But the connected world of that time was too simple to sustain an ecosystem of rogue escapees. Even today, much of the intern...
This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A training center has been running its simulator suite for eighteen months. Now operators are preparing for a mission in a new region. The intelligence office has fresh terrain and threat data, some of it too sensitive to leave the building. Until the simulators are updated with that data, pilots and sensor operators cannot practice in the new environment. Can the training center make...
Chessbook-1, Maia-3 and Allie 2.0 at a glance Capability scorecard: a 0-100 grade per measurement, and whether the model has the capability at all. Predicting human moves Matching strength Time scramble play Predicting think time Predicting who wins Chessbook-1 199M parameters 96 / 100 81 / 100 84 / 100 98 / 100 97 / 100 Maia-3 79M parameters 85 / 100 56 / 100 57 / 100 No 80 / 100 Allie 2.0 5.6B parameters 99 / 100 48 / 100 99 / 100...
New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Many new printing options The Advanced print dialog has new options, each with a matching -print-settings value: Print each page at its document page size ( paper=auto ) for documents with mixed page sizes ( #533 ) Choose paper source by document page size ( bin=auto ) ( #349 ) Center page horizontally on the paper ( center ) ( #348 ) Stretch pages to fill paper ( stretch ) ( #2220 ) Rotate printout ( rotate=90|1...
This morning, two critical PHP Security Advisories were published: RCE via OOM corruption (9.2/10) RCE via stale global state (9.2/10) If you're running PHP for any service, you need to upgrade immediately to 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, or 8.5.12. And if you use Remi's repos on RedHat-derivative Linux distros, you need to switch to official repos temporarily as Remi's on vacation and can't update his community repo. (Reminds me of xkcd 2347 ). Remi pushed updates even while on vaca...
FedEx closed fiscal 2026 with about 300,000 permanent full-time and 230,000 permanent part-time employees, according to its 10-K for the year ended May 31, 2026. Two business exits followed: FedEx Freight on June 1 and FedEx Supply Chain on October 1. These FedEx employee statistics cover headcount, unit splits, union status, hourly pay, turnover and labor costs from 2025 and 2026 filings and pay data. FedEx Employee Statistics ~230,000 Permanent part-time employees at FedEx on May 31, ...
Originally published on Rails At Scale . The title was bait to get you to open this article. But fear not! We will be generating code at run-time today. (See the PR for a sneak peek.) Sam popped into the JIT channel asking how we might optimize Rails enums in Roundhouse, motivated by the following code snippet: class Order ruby -I~/git/ips/lib test.rb -- create_table(:orders) -> 0.0073s shippable?: 1.721M i/s (± 2.3%, GC 4.4%) aaron@Aarons-MBP ~/g/rails (main...
My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones ( play it here ). Unlike my previous experiments , this one is actually fun to play . I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also supports multiplayer between nearby devices using audio to synchronize game state! Here's what I've built so far, and some of the things I learned along the way. Battle Drones ...
Decision models have exploded onto the scene recently, starting with TypeSafe’s Jev, followed by Perplexity’s Decider, Liquid’s d1, Cloudflare’s Clef, and OpenAI’s Decisions API 1 . These models promise fast, inexpensive classification. Decision models are an appealing low-cost alternative to LLM judges 2 for automated evals. But whether they’re the right choice depends on the cost, performance, and latency requirements of your use case. We’ve also noticed people using the def...
A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example, we created Slack channels where we tasked Claude with being obsessively focused on the health of a single component. We call these Claudes “superfans.” We have a scion-daemon superfan, a...
Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Astrolab is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the third year in a row! 🌙 California-based Astrolab is developing large multi-purpose rovers called FLIP and FLEX for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. The first FLIP rover is slated to fly on Astrobotic’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander . And NASA has selected a FLEX rover as one of its two Artemis crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicles, ...
La Conquete, by Jose Clemente Orozco, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I was on MTS Live talking about robots, p...
On a frigid February morning in Edinburgh, Scotland, Patrick Hickey had run out of living things to put under his microscope. The plants and fungi in his garden had dried up, and summer puddles, with their flamboyant biological complexity, had long frozen over. Hickey, a mycologist at Hypha Research Ltd., was using plant leaves to study mitochondria, cellular organelles that generate energy. Source On a frigid February morning in Edinburgh, Scotland, Patrick Hickey had run out of living thing...
Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to figure out? I fear most people do not realize this last part: that when it takes time and effort from others to figure out what % is AI, and what % is YOU, then I will simply assume it’s probably 100% A...
In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-94300 for the project BIND 9 named , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix memory corruption in named triggered by replaying captured GSS-TSIG-signed UDP messages while the negotiated TSIG key remains valid, potentially allowing remote code execution when combined with crafted queries to an attacker-controlled zone. This is due to the affected components bei...
In fall of 1985 when I started graduate school, my advisor Michael Sipser asked me to read an early handwritten manuscript by Johan Håstad of his switching lemma . I spent many hours decoding the notation and working through the messy conditional probabilities until I felt I had checked every step of the proof. When I started presenting this to Sipser, he stopped me and said he didn't want the details but instead the intuition of the proof. I had nothing. I'm reminded of this story as I hea...
I’m assuming you all gave a sigh of relief when you saw digital text rather than scans of my handwriting. This post is largely a set of updates and corrections to my previous post; given the lack of revisions I have some corrections to make. Beyond that, the lack of reflection on my thoughts during the editing process had me coming to realizations after hitting post, alongside a few misc updates. I’m assuming you all gave a sigh of relief when you saw digital text rather than scans of my ha...
Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics , because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something 1 like this: It doesn’t matter how effective LLMs are at technical fields like programming or mathematics, because one of the essential values of those fields is that they’re art . While it looks to laypeople like these fields ...
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. 1 In this article, I examine the 8087...